


Wed to the Night

by tactfulGnostalgic



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Anxiety Attacks, Canon Compliant, Existential Crisis, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Maybe Not Quite Human Cecil, POV Carlos (Welcome to Night Vale)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-20
Updated: 2017-02-20
Packaged: 2018-09-25 17:39:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9835169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tactfulGnostalgic/pseuds/tactfulGnostalgic
Summary: The Voice of Night Vale’s wedding day is heralded by a rainstorm, and it finds his fiancé amidst an existential crisis over, among other things, the aforementioned Voice’s complex relationship to his city.In other words: Carlos learns to live with the reality of being loved by not only a radio host, but by the very town that the radio host personifies.





	

It rains on Carlos’ wedding day.

It’s not unusual insofar as he expected his wedding to be a sunny occasion -- he better than anybody knows that the weather is a capricious and almost certainly vindictive entity -- but it _is_ unusual insofar as it’s the first rainstorm that Night Vale’s had in, from what he can tell from the records, years. He spends the first seven hours of his wedding day running around outside in the pouring rain, both attempting to get meteorological readings and desperately trying to protect the non-waterproof equipment that his team stationed outside. Cecil spends those hours in the radio booth, fondly narrating his fiancé’s activity and alternately commenting on the general state of disaster which the unexpected downpour wrought. It is, considering the normal course of a Saturday, almost mundane.

He complains about it later, of course. His scientists are trying to buckle down the tarp over some particularly expensive radiology equipment, and he’s using a rock to hammer down wood slats of the shabby lean-to protecting his work station, and he distracts himself from the tedium of it all by grumbling about the rain.

“You’d think,” he says, curtly, “of all possible days to disrupt a perfect statistical average of _zero_ inches of rain per year --”

“It’s a pain, boss,” agrees Stacy, who’s using her stiletto to fasten a plastic poncho over an X-ray. “No doubt, no doubt.”

“It’s unprecedented! It’s ridiculous!”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Someone make a note,” he orders. “If at any time in the future we find the urge to study unreasonable weather patterns, all you have to do is schedule somebody’s wedding --”

Stacy sighs and takes the hammer from his hands. “Go hang out with your fiancé,” she says. “We’ll handle things.”

(They nail three separate pieces of equipment down improperly and accidentally release an entire terrarium of omniscient tarantulas while he’s gone, but they reason afterward that if the tarantulas were really as smart as their findings indicated, they would have orchestrated their own release at some later point, anyway.)

* * *

 Cecil later tells him that his day at the station was much the same.

“I just couldn’t get any work done,” he confesses. “It was awful. I stumbled over everything.”

“You did _not,”_ Carlos objects, because he listened to those recordings, and Cecil, like always, did not miss a single word --

“I _did!_  All over the place. I skipped an entire paragraph of daily announcements, I think, I was so _nervous_. I was a wreck.”

“Not as much as I was,” Carlos will mumble, and Cecil will smile fondly, and he’ll lean over to kiss his husband’s cheek.

That doesn’t happen until after, though.

* * *

 He stands in his bedroom two hours before he’s supposed to arrive at the banquet hall, his tie hanging loose around his neck and the storm battering itself against the side of their apartment.

He’s wearing what he thinks is as close to formal wear as can be purchased from any local retail shop; black trousers, a white button-down, a grey jacket. His lab coat lies draped over the desk chair and he feels naked without it, but he promised Maureen -- who sorted out their color scheme -- he wouldn’t wear it.

Rain courses against the windows and a roll of thunder startles him. He usually doesn’t startle this easily. But it’s usually not dark outside at one o’clock in the afternoon.

White static rips through his head in place of rational thought with the next wave of rain. It’s nothing supernatural; it wouldn’t worry him, if it were supernatural. It’s anxiety, pulsing in his throat and eating at the edges of the grey matter in his brain. He stumbles over to the bed and puts his head between his knees, and listens to his pulse beat in his ears. And he thinks, _This shouldn’t be happening, it’s just a storm, you’re about to get married, for God’s sake --_

Because he’s marrying _Cecil,_ who, for all of his virtues, is still something so strange and alien to Carlos that even when he knows him better than he knows himself, he still sometimes feels like he doesn’t know Cecil at all.

It’s because of the town. It’s because the town is linked to Cecil, somehow -- linked in a way that means that five minutes after proposing, everyone in the city started congratulating them with a knowing twinkle in their eyes. Linked in a way that means that only a scant handful of milestones in their relationship have gone unpublicized, and even then, perhaps he just doesn’t know about their publicization from a collective sense of decency --

_Night Vale does nothing normally, not dating, especially not marriage --_

Because he can’t shake the feeling that something, inevitably, _obviously,_ is going to go wrong, and when it happens it’s going to be Carlos’ fault.

He hardly did any research on the venue. He only performed perfunctory radiation tests, a few basic sweeps to find out whether it was resting on an active faultline, and one or two checks to find out if it was haunted. (It was, but the ghost was benign, so they signed the lease anyway.) He didn’t taste the wines for poison beforehand, he didn’t ask for Cecil to have an intern vet the older schoolmates he had invited -- he hadn’t thought to test the cake for hidden snares and traps. And he knows he’s being paranoid, but he can’t shake the thought that maybe paranoia is what’s kept him alive this long -- how else _could_ he be alive, when everyone else from his original team is dead, and his current scientific team is assembled from what few Night Vale citizens he could get interested in his line of work.

And if something doesn’t happen to Carlos, then it’ll happen to Cecil: Cecil, who’s already suffered so much for his connections to Night Vale, and whose wedding, by all means, should be a disaster of biblical proportions.

Carlos squeezes his knees to his temples and breathes.

The door to the bedroom inches open and he whips his head back, groping blindly for something to fling at an imaginary intruder.

Instead, his fiancé slips through the doorway, wearing a fluorescent jacket and an apologetic smile. “Hi,” Cecil says, and then, immediately -- “Carlos?”

Carlos means to say something but his throat closes and eliminates that possibility.

“Carlos? What’s wrong?” Cecil’s face is knit with concern. He approaches and kneels in front of Carlos, searching to meet Carlos’ eyes, hands resting gently on Carlos’ knees. “Tell me -- it’s okay, do you want to put off the ceremony? We can put it off, if you want -- is it Void Sickness? I asked City Council to give you immunity from Void Sickness for these few weeks --”

“It’s not Void Sickness,” Carlos manages, and his stomach turns immediately afterward. “It’s -- the normal stuff. Uh.”

“Oh.” Cecil looks measurably calmed, although no less worried. “I see.” He pushes himself up and sits on the bed beside him. “Do you want --”

“No. Just -- ah, just -- quiet? Please.”

“Okay.” Cecil nods, clicking his tongue awkwardly. “Right. Quiet. I’ll do that, then. Stop talking, I mean.”

“Cecil.”

“Sorry.”

He breathes. In, out -- in, out -- the rain lessens, and Cecil’s hand rests warm and heavy on his shoulder. His thoughts clear slightly.

“The storm,” he says. “The storm is -- it’s really unlucky, isn’t it?”

Cecil tilts his head. “What do you mean?”

“I mean. It’s. Nothing is ever easy,” he says. “Nothing is ever simple, here. So, when it started raining, I figured. I figured it meant something bad was going to happen.”

“That’s not very scientific of you.”

“No. Anxiety is not often very scientific,” Carlos points out, and Cecil nods sagely.

“You don’t have to worry,” he assures him. “I had Josie pick out the date. There’s less than a three percent chance of the apocalypse. It is, in fact, the lowest chance of an apocalypse we’ve had in years!”

“That still doesn’t exempt -- doesn’t exempt disasters from happening, Cece.”

“No, but it does narrow the field somewhat,” Cecil agrees cheerfully.

“It’s really, empirically speaking, statistically unlikely. That is, us. Us living, that is, us, being together, or, I guess, both together and okay.”

Cecil considers, and then nods. “Yes,” he says, utterly calm. “But I don’t think that the omnipotent beings dictating our fortunes really give much credence to statistical likelihoods, all things considered.”

Carlos laughs breathlessly and finds a hysterical giddiness rising in his chest. He keeps breathing.

When he’s finished, his heart rate is almost normal and Cecil is rubbing circles on his shoulder. “Thanks,” he says, ignoring his own blush, and then says, “I’m ready to go now, if you want,” and then notices Cecil’s suit, which is changing color like a disco light. He stares.

“It’s nice, isn’t it?” Cecil turns up the collar flirtatiously. “I picked it out myself.”

“I suspected,” Carlos says absently, although Cecil doesn’t seem to think anything of the quip. “What’s it made of?”

“Cotton. Polyester. A little bit of silk, I think. Why?”

“I -- no reason.” Carlos shakes his head. “No reason.”

He stands up and wipes his palms on his pants. “I, uh. We should maybe start going? I don’t know. When does it start?”

Cecil reaches for Carlos’ tie and begins tying it. “Hush,” he instructs him. “We’ve got time.”

“Do we? I don’t want to be late. Can you be late for your own wedding? Will people be angry if we’re not there at --”

“The answers to those questions, in order,” Cecil says, with fond and infinite patience, “is yes, no, and accordingly, no.”

“You didn’t do a show today,” Carlos blurts in a rush, and then his head falls forward on Cecil’s shoulder. Cecil’s deft fingers at his neck make soothing, slow movements, and everything feels much more alright than it did before.

“No. I had to call in a sub. Station Management understood.” The knot fastens high in the collar and nestles close to Carlos’ neck, a grounding pressure. “Weddings are one of three management-approved off days.”

“What are the other two?”

“Birth and death,” Cecil says cheerfully. “Anything else has to be filed for. And they ate the application forms some time ago.”

“Right.” Carlos nods. Cecil’s hands, no longer occupied with his tie, run up and down his shoulder blades in nonsense patterns.

“I love you,” Cecil says, by and by. The rain stops, and the trickle of water from gutter pipes fills the silence it leaves.

“Me, too.” Carlos’ face heats. “That is --”

“I know what you meant.”

He leans up and kisses Cecil. Cecil makes a noise of pleased surprise and his hands sneak lower, lower still, almost underneath Carlos’ jacket, until Carlos swats them away and curls his tongue around Cecil’s to distract him instead. They fall back on the bed, and neither of them have the wherewithal to pull away for a while after that.

When Carlos rises, his hair is in an irresolvable state of distress and Cecil looks thoroughly kissed, and just looking at him raises at least five persuasive arguments as to why they should cancel the entire wedding and spend the rest of the day inside, making a thorough continuation their most recent line of activity.

But he helps Cecil up and tries to fix his hair, instead, because the deposit is nonrefundable and he’s already rented the suit.

“Your jacket defies the laws of physics,” he tells Cecil.

“Oh, _thank_ you!” Cecil’s answering beam belies a fundamental misunderstanding of what Carlos means, but such is normal when Carlos tries to tell Cecil that something about him defies some fundamental law. They seem to flatter him.

Carlos shrugs on his lab coat and decides that Maureen can bring it up with him if she likes, but it’s his wedding, and he’ll wear what he damn well pleases.

“Love you,” he tells Cecil, and his voice barely shakes at all. “Come marry me.”

* * *

 Their wedding ceremony is an exercise in reconciling cultural differences. For the most part, he lets others manage it; the music, venue, and ceremony are planned without his input, which he’s glad of. He doesn’t have anything he feels it’s important to add, really, and everyone else seemed so determined to have it planned just so. He almost feels guilty in vetoing some of their more extravagant requests, such as a parade, or possibly a fireworks display. Everyone was terribly excited about those two, but he did feel he should object to having his wedding publicized like a municipal holiday.

(The only places Carlos doesn’t feel guilty putting his foot down are on the animal sacrifices and the blood fondue fountain, which Cecil is amenable enough to relinquishing -- “It’s so _traditional,_ really, Carlos, most people are doing away with it anyway.”)

The real affair is not so unlike what he imagined his wedding being like, not that he often imagined he’d ever have a wedding. Old Woman Josie marries them in a way that is uniquely her own; she murmurs something in an ancient and forgotten tongue and has one of the Erikas hand them the rings, and performs it all underneath a handmade bloodstone arch that one of Cecil’s college friends sent them. The rings are made of a gold-ish material that glows sometimes and turns black in others, and would probably make an entire paper’s worth of study, if Carlos had the time or the impetus to scrutinize them. The vows are spoken in High Greek, a language Carlos didn’t know existed and still isn’t sure _does_ exist, and he has to read his bit off a scrap of paper that Steve slips him under the table. Cecil has his own vows memorized and the words slide off his tongue flawlessly, of course, and he’s bemused as to why Carlos isn’t equally fluent. It’s a negligible misstep. Nobody much seems to mind. It’s all nicer than it sounds.

Then there’s toasts, and dancing, and music that sounds like it was written by someone who knows what music should sound like _approximately_ but not _exactly,_ and Cecil kisses his cheek and goes off to rub elbows with some of his older friends, and Carlos drifts around between groups of people who all welcome him with loud cheers and raunchy congratulations.

The sheer number of people there defies physics. There’s Dana, caped and crowned, and Earl, in his chef uniform and looking for all the world like he’d rather be in the kitchen; and then there’s Lacy, and Tamika, and Basimah, chatting together at a table; and John Peters -- you know, the farmer -- and Diane and Josh Crayton, just scuttling out the door; and Sheriff Sam, and Janice Palmer-Carlsberg, and her date, Hippolyta, both rising freshmen; and the Faceless Old Woman whom he hopes, fervently, does not live in his home --

The point being that there’s a lot of people. Too many people, one might even say. He exiles himself to a corner and takes deep breaths, and periodic sips of champagne, to calm himself down. Congregations don’t bother him, usually, but everyone seems to want to pay him a lot of attention, and Carlos has never been good with lots of people paying attention to him at once.

After a time, and after he’s sufficiently calmed down, Janice approaches, weaving her wheelchair in between dancers with ineffable grace. She wears a smart black suit that is similar to her uncle’s in style, if not in hue.

“Hi, Uncle Carlos,” she says, and hands him a small giftwrapped box. “This is my present. This is to say, my present for you. It’s not a present for me.”

“I got that.” He takes it and pulls at the ribbon. “Uh, we weren’t really planning to unwrap things here.”

“I know. Open it anyway. I want to see what you think.” Janice blinks and her eyes turn vivid lilac. She looks much like her mother, with black hair cropped close around her chin and wide, narrow eyes, but sometimes she holds herself in a way that reminds Carlos like nothing so much as Cecil himself.

“All right.” He opens the box. Inside it is an exquisite silver can opener, with serrated teeth carved to look like shark incisors. His name is engraved along the base, along with a series of lottery numbers and a brief prophecy of his death. It’s touching.

“I engineered it myself,” she informs him. Her face is nonchalant, but he doesn’t miss the undercurrent of hope in her voice. “It took me three weeks. Hip did the silverwork. It can be used to open a variety of municipally approved canned goods, as well as slay a variety of wild beasts. I tested both functions extensively.”

“Very scientific.”

“Yes,” she says, obviously pleased at his praise. “I thought you would like that information.”

He thanks her anyway and tucks it back in its box.

“Cecil really likes you,” she says at length, resting a hand on his elbow. “He told me so.”

“That’s -- that’s good. I, uh, really like him, too.”

“I expect you to. You are married, after all.” She says it factually, as if the sanctity of marriage as a romantic institution is both unquestionable and absolute.

“Yeah.” He casts a look over at Cecil. His jacket is cycling from turquoise to olive in time with the music, and it makes Carlos inexplicably fond. “Where did he get that jacket?”

“From Brooks Brothers, Uncle, where else?” Janice’s voice is only somewhat haughty. “Mom took him shopping for it.”

“But, uh. The color.”

“What about the color?”

“It’s. Changing?”

Janice looks him in the eye and says, with a voice that sounds uncannily like her uncle’s, “Color is an illusion of the human mind struggling to process the unthinkable quantity of information which bypasses each sensory organ at every moment. It describes the unknowable in terms of the known, ignores the unknowable but vainly denies its unknowability. This is not unlike the human propensity for storytelling.” Then she adds, “You’ll be a good uncle,” and gives Carlos a firm handshake.

“Thank you?”

Hippolyta sidles up with two glasses of something viscous and purple. “I got these for you,” she tells Janice. Carlos thinks that she looks a bit solemn for someone at a wedding -- eyes hooded and her jaw set, wearing an ankle-length black Victorian ballgown -- but Janice smiles brightly and says “Thanks, Hip,” so he figures it’s normal.

“You neglected the other three syllables of my name.”

“Yes.”

“Such is an oversight on your behalf. The proper form of address necessitates considerably more longevity than was dedicated to it.”

“You’re an insufferable sesquipedalian.”

“Yes.” Hippolyta nods and adds nothing; she hands Janice her glass. Janice beams like someone just gave her the moon in a bottle. Carlos decides to delicately remove himself from the situation before they start exchanging polysyllabic flirtations.

Abby and Steve are slow-dancing next to Michelle and Maureen, who seem to be vigorously exploring the limits of how intimate two people can be while only touching two fingers. The music turns to something Gregorian for strings, a tastefully modern piece. Cecil is chatting with Josie, and seems not to miss him, for the time being. The heat starts getting to Carlos, and he ducks outside.

The desert air is comfortably thick. His car is parked closest to the doorway, amidst rows of minivans and convertibles and a few unclassified vehicles that he avoids looking directly at. His truck is worn down and rusting at the edges, but he drove it here anyway. It’s the only thing he has left from before he moved here, except maybe his lab coat -- but he doesn’t even know if it’s _his_ lab coat, or if one of the other scientists took his -- they’re all stored in a cabinet at the back of the lab, so there’s no way of knowing -- at any rate, his truck is all he has.

He hops up on the hood and watches. The banquet hall is perched above the town, on a small mesa lying just a mile or two from downtown Night Vale. The sun is slowly dipping under the sand wastes, the sky burning like fire along a line of gunpowder at the horizon. Some parts of the town sparkle into the night. Some parts of the town do not. All of the town is quiet and abated by the sudden lack of heat and light which fuels it. It almost looks normal. A quick glance reveals the comfortable truth that nothing there is even remotely close to such a state.

An Erika approaches the truck. They’re taller than the average Erika, with a skeleton like a wire sculpture wrapped under layers and layers of skin like static on a dead television channel. Their eyes are like black marbles nestled in the slate of their face, but they reflect unknowable intelligence and an emotion that human language cannot and will never describe.

Carlos thinks he’s been listening too much to Cecil.

Erika crosses their legs in a gesture so drastically at odds with the natural movement of their body that it makes Carlos’ head hurt. “Good party,” they say. “My congratulations.”

“Thanks,” he says. He’s never sure of the appropriate tone to take with an Erika. They never seem hostile, per se, but nonetheless it seems right to let them speak first. Terrible things have happened to people for less egregious failures than those of etiquette.

“Make sure to update your tax information.”

“I will. We -- we will.”

“Good. There are repercussions to those who do not update their tax information.”

“I know. Or -- well, I didn’t know, before, but now you’ve told me, so I know. Thanks.”

The angel settles itself on the hood. They seem at ease; he wonders if angels drink. Or, if they do, what they drink. He thinks Josie mentioned something about Merlot, once.

“You are very lucky,” they say idly.

“Yeah, I -- I know.”

“You do not.” They are, again, idle. “This is not a regard for your husband’s extraordinarily pleasant temperament. It is a general statement about the status of your existence with regards to its past obstacles.”

“Right,” Carlos says faintly. “Uh.”

“Sorry. This is really unnerving, isn’t it? This is weird.” The Erika knits their fingers. “Erika tells me that I can be weird sometimes.”

“No, it’s fine. You’re, uh, you’re fine.”

“Good. Because I thought I’d tell you, yes? I thought I should tell you.”

“Tell me -- I’m lucky?”

“Not exactly.” The angel’s skin flutters. It’s not as unpleasant to watch as one might think. “But you seem unaware.”

“Probably. Everyone is unaware about lots of things. That’s why science --”

“This is not about science. Very little, ultimately, is about science.” Carlos opens his mouth to object, but thinks better of interrupting them. “This is about you.”

“And?”

“I do not lightly dabble in prophecy.” Erika’s voice drops to the pitch of static atmosphere before a thunderstorm. “But -- I think it worth saying -- that if that boy didn’t love you, you’d be dead.”

They say it with the gruesome finality of someone reading yesterday’s headlines. Something crawls up Carlos’ spine. He reaches back without thinking and pulls the spider out of his collar. It whispers a heartfelt _‘congratulations’_ when he tosses it away.

“I know,” he says, and doesn’t think about that, either. It’s a topic that he edges away from uncomfortably at the best of times, and sends him into crippling fits of instability at worst.

“But,” Erika says, in a tone that he suspects is meant to be comforting, “so would this city.”

“What do you mean?”

They do not explain. Their eyes run along the horizon slowly, tracing the shape of Night Vale’s silhouette against a rapidly fading sunset. There is something great and terrible etched in their face; years of things that have happened, and even now are happening, and things that have not yet been -- but will soon be -- written in the hunch of their spine.

“He sustains,” they say, simply, and the truth of it rings in Carlos’ ears like a tolling bell.

He thinks that he’s somehow both far too drunk and not nearly drunk enough to be having this conversation. “The weekly allotment of enigmatically foreboding statements was downsized from twenty to fifteen last Tuesday,” he tells them. “You’re blowing through them pretty quickly.”

The angel’s laugh is the sound of a cheese grater scraping on oak wood. Carlos quells the instinct to pull out a hand recorder and ask for a repeat performance. They say nothing, but put their hand on his forehead and trace a strange glyph there, a tangle of crisscrossing lines and sharp loops. The lines burn for a moment before cooling, like skin briefly exposed to a hot stove.

Erika presses their six-knuckled fingers to his cheek, once, and then rises to its full height and ambles back towards the party. Carlos’ face feels slightly numb.

“Erika!” Cecil’s voice is loud and warm, far at odds with the solemnity of the conversation he interrupted. “Josie’s been looking for you.”

The angel makes a mildly exasperated noise with clear undertones of affection and straightens their tie, giving Cecil a nod of acknowledgement. Cecil slips past it and hops up on the car beside him.

His jacket is rotating around the color spectrum at a leisurely pace, although his tie has the dignity to remain a solid purple. He kicks his feet gently against the grill of the car and seems content to wait in silence for Carlos to say something, which Carlos isn’t sure he’ll ever be. His forehead is still tingling. He feels a rush of affection for his husband.

“They, uh,” he says, clears his throat, tries again. “They drew something on my face. It felt kind of weird. And I don’t know if that’s, like, a normal wedding gift, or whatever -- should I be worried?”

Cecil laughs delightedly. “Oh! No, that’s just a blessing. Very nice of them, we should remember to send them a gift basket.”

“A blessing?”

He flutters a hand absentmindedly. “You know. Protection from evil, impervious to harm, dispositional invisibility.”

“Dispositional?”

“Dispositional,” Cecil confirms, resting his head against Carlos’ shoulder and refusing to elaborate. “You should try it. It’s one of seven officially recognized superpowers that don’t require a license.”

“That’s very nice of them,” Carlos agrees.

“Oh, yes.” The moon is slipping without a thin patch of desert clouds, and shines like a government searchlight. It’s full; Josie said that was a good omen. Then, she says a lot of things are good omens. She never seems to be completely wrong, either.

He looks at Cecil. His husband’s face is open and clear, gazing out over his town. It’s smooth and the lines that normally appear there have vanished in the moonlight. It seems inconceivable that he could be anything but human -- minor aberrations notwithstanding -- looking as he does now, unconcerned and light with the joy of living. Wearing Carlos’ ring. No microphone in sight. Silent, Cecil isn’t abnormal at all: he’s an ordinary, mortal man, happy and quiet.

Erika’s voice seems to echo from the town below: _He sustains._

“Cecil,” Carlos says, hesitant to ruin the mood, but ever incapable of resisting his own curiosity.

“Carlos,” Cecil says, in the same tone, ever incapable of minding.

“Everyone came.” Carlos struggles for his words. He’s always had to struggle for his words; they don’t come to him naturally. “I mean, everybody that could. Everybody that, physiologically speaking, has a body that a) exists, and b) can fit within the confines of the venue. And that’s a lot of people! Even the people who don’t even _like_ you, Ceec, and they didn’t even _want_ to be here.”

His husband contemplates it. “You never know,” he says thoughtfully. “Maybe they wanted free drinks.”

Carlos thinks to argue, and then thinks better of it. “Yeah, okay,” he says faintly. “That’s fair.”

There’s a gruesome snarl from just inside the doorway and Cecil sighs. “Miriam got into the candy,” he complains. “She promised she wouldn’t. She grows talons when she’s had sugar, and nobody wants to dance with her when she has talons -- and she gets _testy_ when nobody wants to dance with her -- I should go --”

Carlos loops their arms together and says, simply, “Let it be,” and Cecil does.

“Hippolyta seems very nice,” Carlos offers, at length.

“Oh, yes. She took first place in the spelling bee by spelling the word ‘floccinaucinihilipilification.’ Janice was smitten.”

“She moves fast.”

“There will only be so many people in your life that can spell the word ‘‘floccinaucinihilipilification,’ Carlos. You have to hang onto keepers when they come to you.”

“Smart girl.”

“Very.” Cecil pokes him meaningfully.“She gets that from the _Palmer_ side of the family.”

Carlos flicks Cecil’s shoulder fondly. “You promised Abby you wouldn’t bicker with Steve.”

“So it’s a very good thing he isn’t here now.” Cecil drops it anyway. He laces his fingers with Carlos’, tender.

The moon flickers twice and then keeps shining. Across the desert, a band of people are dancing to a music that only they can hear. There are animals prowling across the hills in the distance, but none of them are close enough to be concerning; and if they were, there would be someone to take care of it. His wedding night, like all other nights in this city, is deep and full of horrors. Such constancy is, if nothing else, comforting.

Cecil’s hair flops in his face and Carlos reaches over to brush it out of his eyes. Cecil’s eyes flutter closed as his fingers slide across the scalp.

“We should be going soon. We still have to clean up.”

“Mmrgh.” The sound escaping Cecil’s throat is undignified and unbefitting someone who speaks for a living. “That sounds like a lot of work.”

“Probably.”

“Can’t it wait?”

“We want our deposit, Cecil.”

“Yeah. Yeah! Okay.” He lifts his head. His eyes are bleary and his hair is mussed, and he looks fantastic. “We should.”

Neither of them do.

“What were you talking to Erika about?”

Carlos considers.

“Things.”

“Classified things?”

“No.”

“Science things?”

He pauses. “Indirectly.”

“Aha.” Cecil nods. “They don’t know a lot about science at all. I wouldn’t take their word for anything.”

“It was more about statistical analysis. And probability. And a little bit about you.”

“About me? Oh, gosh, what did they say?” Cecil peers over his shoulder suspiciously. “Erika’s a downright gossip, don’t believe a word they say -- unless it was Erika, they’re much nicer --”

“It wasn’t anything bad. They were just kind of talking about your job. I think.” Carlos squeezes his hand. “They said you were . . . I don’t know.”

“Well, that’s a very weird thing to say.” Cecil cocks his head. “Nothing untoward, I hope.”

“No, nothing like that.” Cecil’s jacket pauses its cycle on a vivid taupe color and yellow polka dots appear over the shoulder pads. “I was just -- thinking. About the town. And you. And about you and the town, jointly, as in, one entity, being linked, and all that.”

“I don’t know what you mean. What does that have to do with my job?”

Cecil’s frown is light and seems borne more from confusion than concern. Carlos watches him for a moment, and then shrugs.

“It’s probably nothing important,” he lies, and turns back to the cityscape.

The equation dictating the curve of the nearest sand dune, he estimates, is the reflection of the equation dictating the turn of Cecil’s cheek when he smiles. Other facts: Cecil’s hair is the same color as the moon when full, and always seems to be windswept, no matter how much effort Cecil puts into looking well-groomed. When they go to Big Rico’s, a slice of Cecil’s favorite type of pizza is always waiting on the table they choose. The temperature of said slice of pizza is always ten degrees upwards of how Cecil prefers to eat it, and the time it takes to cool ten degrees is precisely equivalent to how long it takes Carlos’ order to appear. When it rains, Cecil always seems to have an umbrella tucked in the trunk of his car or the corner of his recording booth, or just over the crook of his arm, plain as day, even though when he’d left the house he’d had nothing on him but his keys.

Cecil was born here, Carlos thinks, and Cecil will die here. He knows things about the town that would make others’ ears bleed to hear. He’s the heart of his city and his voice is blood, knitting the metropolis together. He has a mind labyrinthine in its complexity, and a heart as steadfast and earnest as any cardiovascular muscle that Carlos has ever studied. He’s too real and not real enough to be believed. He’s Night Vale, dark and deep and gold on the inside, wrapped in soft skin and sharp teeth and hair like moonlight.

His eyes shift and catch Carlos staring at him, and a blush dusts the top of his cheeks.

“You’re staring,” he complains.

“Yeah.” It rasps at his throat. He doesn’t understand why. Maybe he’s had too much to drink. “Uh. Yeah.”

“Making observations?”

“Yes. Very scientific, this. What I’m doing. That is, looking at you. Science in action.”

“Science is neat,” Cecil parrots, and leans in to kiss him.

Kissing Cecil is mundane in the best ways. It’s not like kissing a city, or anything incredible or unknown or unknowable -- it’s just kissing a man, kissing his boyfriend, kissing his _husband,_ whose lips move gently against his and whose hand tangles fumblingly with his own before grasping tightly, like two kids making out in the dark.

Cecil makes a quiet noise that’s more akin to satisfaction than excitement. He pulls away briefly to take a breath and then kisses the corner of Carlos’ mouth, once, and says, “We _should_ go inside.”

“We should,” Carlos agrees, and leans in again.

They don’t go inside until Sheriff Sam comes out and yells at them for public indecency, which Cecil points out isn’t really public indecency if it falls within the legal boundaries of newlywed expression, a statement corroborated by Dana, who finds it, in her own words, “kind of cute,” but by that time the moment is ruined.

They say goodbye to their guests in a long procession of farewells that culminates with the Palmer-Carlsberg family, who had stayed a few minutes after everyone else to help with cleanup. Janice bids Hippolyta goodbye by reciting a self-composed sonnet in iambic pentameter, to which Hippolyta replies by reciting pi to the one hundred and fourteenth digit. Everyone seems to find this very risqué.

Abby and Cecil have a quiet conversation in the corner while Carlos and Steve finish sweeping up the last of the broken champagne bottles. When they return, Cecil offers Steve a reluctant and obviously distasteful handshake, which Steve returns with delight and barely restrained tears. Abby looks proud of them both.

The Palmer-Carlsbergs leave at last, and then they are alone again. They climb into the backseat of Carlos’ car and huddle there against the night, which turns cold quickly after two o’clock A.M. Cecil’s chest is warm and his jacket phases between indigo and maroon.

Overhead, the moon is still beautiful. Mysterious government helicopters glide across the horizon. Cecil is only pretending to sleep. There are one hundred things within a one-mile radius alone that defy scientific explanation. Night Vale is still deadly, and wrought with the paranormal, and very likely will kill him, someday. These are scientific facts. But Night Vale is a worry for another time -- for now, he’s safe, sleeping curled up beside its heart.

**Author's Note:**

> Podfic available here! http://archiveofourown.org/works/12790269


End file.
